


if this one wasn't enough

by bluesey



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-08 00:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7734982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesey/pseuds/bluesey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Don't worry, princess," he says with that crooked smile that always manages to ease the tension in her chest, hands cupping her jaw, thumb light on her bottom lip. "There's always next time."</p><p>(or, Bellamy and Clarke in every universe.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	if this one wasn't enough

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [this](http://tinebernardino.tumblr.com/post/11951749061/25-lives-by-tongari-achingly-lovely-delicately) post
> 
> title from how big, how blue, how beautiful by florence + the machine and the quotes at the beginning and end are rumi's.

_First, when I was apart from you,_  
_this world did not exist,_  
_nor any other._

  


i.

In this one, he is brown haired and earth-shatteringly beautiful and he does not love her back. He's only twenty-three but he already knows how to break his own heart with practiced finesse, and she thinks it has to do with the way he’s always leaving a piece of himself with everyone he meets.

In this one, he keeps his heart tucked somewhere safely away from her because he knows she's got a tendency to walk away when things get too heavy to carry sometimes, a tendency to leave a trail of footprints in the dirt that he can't follow. She understands this. He's got his own demons under his bed, his own lungs stained black from the ashes of the dead bones they couldn't save in time, and she's just a war torn girl with holes in her heart made from the bullets that were shot from the people who's love she carries at the bottom of her spine.

In this one, all she wants to do is make the world lighter for him, wants to love him with everything she has, even the broken pieces of herself that she'd thought were irreparable, because the thing about Bellamy is that he does not run from his softness, and he is not afraid of her jagged edges.

But they are not ready for that yet.

ii.

In the next one, they are good at hurting each other. She's a girl with a laugh like the safety click of a gun in the middle of an empty field, firing bullets from the cracks of her teeth whenever she speaks to him, and he feels each of them lodge in the spaces between his rib cage.

He wonders how a mouth that soft could be so dangerous.

But he knows what this is. He knows that this is her way of keeping him close, keeping him at a distance, because underneath that body armor and shield of cruelty she's just a girl who loves too much, too hard, and doesn't know what to do with it all.

Loving her in this one feels a lot like closing a white-knuckled fist around the sharp edge of a knife.

 _Again_ , he thinks, _hurt me again if that's what it takes._

And he's just as brutal, knows her well enough to hit her weak spots, the dents in her armor, and they're good at this. At shoving their feelings deep in their bellies because they're so scared of letting someone mean that much to them.

It’s cruel, but it makes sense.

All they've known in this life is suffering. No longer do the stars shine like they once did when all they can see are the dead bodies falling from the sky, but they forgive each other anyway.

iii.

They meet again in the summer when she's sixteen. She's picking peaches from the tree in his backyard and her hair is cut just below her chin.

He rocks back on the heels of his boots, eyes wandering down the length of her body, lingering on her pink flannel shirt and denim jeans, on her sun-kissed skin. July looks good on her.

“Do I need to tell you a thing or two about trespassing on private property?” he asks, waiting for her startled jump. He isn't surprised when it doesn't come.

She only turns around slowly, an eyebrow raised, one hand on her hip as the other holds a half-eaten peach. If this was another life, one where they're together already, he'd kiss the peach juice on the corner of her mouth clean.

“What else was I supposed to do to get your attention?” There's a slight lilt in her voice, teasing, like his had been.

He steps closer to her and she tilts up her head to look at him better, her chin jutted out like she so often does as an unspoken challenge. She’s small, but she's always felt so much bigger than him.

In this one, it doesn't take long for her to love him back. In this one, they are soft and lazy like the summer heat, and when she kisses him it tastes like peach lipgloss and it's hot, like bare feet on black pavement in the middle of July.

They mostly ride their bikes to the lake by her house on the weekends, scrape their palms as they race each other to the top of the big oak tree, kiss the salt from each other’s skin.

Every Halloween, she dresses up as a princess and he wears the Julius Caesar costume his mother made that's a bit too small now. He stops in the middle of the sidewalk between lamp posts to pull her in to dance while she laughs into his shoulder.

Thanksgivings are at the Griffin house. Once, they get drunk on angry orchids and set the turkey on fire, so they're stuck with frozen mac n’ cheese from the 24 hour market across the street from Bellamy’s apartment.

Christmases are spent at the Blakes’ place, with Wells and Raven and Octavia, since Clarke can't bear to be alone at hers with her mom gone on a business trip and her dad’s ghost haunting every inch of the house. He decorates the tree that's as tall as the ceiling with gold tinsel and apple ornaments with Wells and Raven, bakes sugar cookies with his sister and gets too much flour on his kitchen floor, hunts down Clarke to hang a mistletoe over their heads and she rolls her eyes before she kisses him.

It seems as if, no matter how many of these they get through, the shittiness of their home lives never really changes. But, together, they always manage to be a quiet respite from it.

iv.

The lives in which he’s happy are her favorite, even if that means they don't end up together.

He’s with a girl named Gina, and she makes him laugh so hard he spits out his soda through his nose, makes him forget the weight of all the lives he's lived that weren't too kind to him. They're good for each other, she knows this, and even though it hurts to see them together like that sometimes, she’s glad that it's Gina. Bellamy deserves someone who would never hurt him, who knows every part of him and stays anyway.

Some lives she can’t give that to him.

v.

And then there are the ones where they are living in battle fields, where she smears blood over her mouth like cherry red lipstick, and he stands over her body with a arrow struck through her throat, and she's got a double edged sword through his chest.

She likes these better than the ones where they don't ever meet.

vi.

He’s dressed in rags, mud and grime staining the hem of his pants. His hair is usually tied up in a bun away from his face, the apple of his freckled cheeks dirty with the soil of the earth.

She can't understand how he’s still the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

Princess Clarke rides into the village in the dead of night on a horse to see him some days, or makes her messenger deliver letters stamped with the red of the royal seal when she can't.

He kisses her when it's dark, pushes her up against the side of his brick house, shushing her wide-eyed and white-knuckled with a hand over her mouth when he hears footsteps too close to them, and releases her with a quiet laugh of relief once they fade away.

When she gets back to the castle, she makes sure to head straight to her chambers, so the king and queen don't see the dirt on her white sleeves, so they don't ask what she's been doing out with the commoners. But the servants and the maids don't do much to subdue their knowing glances and barely contained giggles at the prospect of their next queen slumming it with a blacksmith in the next town over.

Clarke brings him gifts sometimes, in silver and gold, sometimes necklaces and earrings for his sister too, and he refuses them at first. Doesn't want to feel like he’s some kind of charity case, that she's doing it out of pity, unaware that she just loves him so much and wants to give him everything in the world. She figured that this was a good way to start.

But Clarke’s realized that it doesn't take much to make Bellamy happy. All he ever asks of her is just to be there.

She gets down on one knee for him in this life, but he just gently moves the hair away from her face and tells her not now. Bellamy’s never wanted to be king, no matter how much he loves her back, and he does, he makes sure that she knows that. He wouldn't ever want to make her think otherwise.

“Don't worry, princess,” he says with that crooked smile that always manages to ease the tension in her chest, hands cupping her jaw, thumb light on her bottom lip. She’s getting married to someone else, a boy with short hair and a quiet heart, a boy that's always wanted to be a king, a boy that's nothing like Bellamy. Clarke can't help but lean up on her toes to press a kiss to his cheek, lightly, barely there, gently tugging at the curls at the nape of his neck. She's going to miss that so much. “There's always next time.”

vii.

(It takes several lifetimes for that to happen.)

She's twenty-six now, working in a doctor’s office in the heart of New York City. He's twenty-eight, a police officer in the outskirts of town.

It's just after seven on a Thursday night. Her husband must have started making dinner for the kids already. His wife must have called the plumber to fix the leaky faucet in their bathroom.

But there's a certain kind of stillness, as if time ceases to exist, when it's just the two of them in a fancy hotel room with silk sheets on bare legs, the air hazy with smoke after they've finished off the joint she only allows herself to indulge in when she's with him. They're good at keeping their secrets just between them.

He thought she'd been dozing off, but she stirs in his arms, rests her chin on his sternum, fits her leg in between both of his. He's running his fingers up and down the ridges of her spine. “Do you believe in aliens and shit?” she asks him.

Bellamy’s eyebrows furrow in thought, adjusting his glasses that'd been slipping from the bridge of his nose. “I don't think about them enough to actually contemplate the legitimacy of their existence. But if I had to, I’d say yes. 99.9%.”

Clarke’s quiet for some time, her fingernails scratching at the back of his neck absently. "Finn doesn't believe in them. Says that Earth is the only planet that contains any life.”

There's a knowing smile on his face when he says, “Mm, and what do you have to say about that?”

“I think that's a very narrow-minded way of thinking," she mumbles, her voice rough and husky with sleep. That's his favorite sound. "There's no possible way that out of the entire galaxy, the entire universe, that we're the only living things out there. That's pretty ridiculous, right?”

Bellamy hums his agreement. “Yeah, well, we already know Finn’s a dumbass. That's not news.”

Her hands find their way down his chest, his sternum, and she places her palm flat over his heart, kisses him there too. "Do you believe in parallel universes?"

“Yeah, I guess so.” Bellamy pinches her side gently then. “What's with all these questions? Are you having another existential crisis?”

"Sometimes I wonder if," she begins, ignoring his teasing. She can be so serious sometimes, "there's a world out there where we're together, and it's easy. Where there's a me, an artist who sells paintings in a big time gallery, with a you, a writer probably, or a school teacher. And we have our own children and two dogs named Buster and Skippy. And we're not hiding anything from anyone. And we're happy."

Bellamy’s fingers stop at the bottom of her spine. "You've thought about it? A life together?"

"Of course. Of course I do. You make it hard not to."

This is the life he likes the least. Because even if they have each other sometimes, it's limited and dirty. It's not the way he wants her. Not the kind of man he wants to be. She makes him feel weak in this one, like he’s never going to have the capability of saying no to her. And they'll go back to their lives, she'll go back to her own family and he'll go back to his, and they’ll have to keep this secret just underneath the surface. It makes his skin itch.

He likes it better when she kills him.

viii.

Bellamy doesn't exist in this one. She aches for him anyway.

viiii.

Her motorcycle breaks down somewhere in an Arizona desert, and that's how he finds her.

Bellamy’s on his way to Southern California for a family wedding. It's not something he was particularly excited about, especially since it's family on his mother’s side so they've got a penchant for passive aggressive jabs at one another until they're drunk enough to loosen their lips entirely.

It’s been an uninteresting road trip of one from Texas so far, consisting mostly of listening to the static of the radio and stopping at gas stations every once in a while to call Octavia to see how she’s doing traveling all the way from Florida. He has to call Miller more frequently, though, or else he and Bryan would never make it out the front door in time to see the ceremony.

And then he sees her.

She's standing at the side of the road, black leather jacket over a white dress that swishes against her knees with every blow of the wind. He slows down once he sees her kicking a motorcycle lying on its side with her clunky combat boots, running her hands through her hair with clear aggravation.

Bellamy pulls over to the side, climbs out of his car and stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Need some help?” He grimaces slightly once he catches sight of smoke coming out of somewhere from the motorcycle. “Looks pretty dead to me.”

She whirls around on her heels once she hears his voice. The wind’s picked up a bit, blowing her hair in front of her face, so she tucks a chunk of it behind her ear and squints to look at him through the glare of the sun. Always, her eyes are the same heart-stopping, gut-punching blue in every life. “You think you can lend a hand? I'm pretty much incompetent when it comes to this kind of mechanical stuff, and this motorcycle was a piece of shit. If my best friend were here I wouldn't be having this problem right now, but alas.”

“Where you headed?” he asks as he opens the passenger’s side for her. She bites her lower lip, stained with a deep red, and tugs on the lapels of her jacket.

“The Golden State. You?”

“Must be a coincidence. Me too.” He rubs the back of his neck and raises his eyebrows, almost shy. “Uh, I'm Bellamy, by the way. Just in case you wanted to know.”

She gives him a smile that almost blinds him, tells him her name is Clarke, and jumps into his car, swinging her legs onto his dashboard. “Well, let's get to it then, Bellamy. We're wasting precious daylight here.”

“What about your motorcycle?” he asks. “Do you want me to put it in the trunk?”

“Nah,” she replies with a shrug. “Wasn't mine anyway.”

“Oh boy,” he mutters as he closes her door and walks around to his side. He doesn't know what he's gotten himself into.

She likes to talk a lot, he notices, and especially with her hands. There's a ring on almost every one of her fingers and they clink every time she gestures wildly. She'd probably take his teeth out if she ever got near his face.

She likes to sing, too, and he likes listening to her, so he'd turn off the radio and roll the windows down, let her sing whatever was stuck in her head in that moment. His favorite is her version of _The House of the Rising Sun_ , the way the husk of her voice lifts the heavy from his chest, the way heads turn when they hear it too, like she's some kind of siren. He looks at her, at her hand dancing in the wind, the soles of her shoes tapping a beat against his dashboard, and she burns so much brighter in every new life in which they meet.

When it gets dark, they stop at a motel and share a room that Clarke pays for as a thanks for the ride. He watches her as she wipes off her makeup, carefully takes off her rings to place them inside a small purple velvet clutch. She touches them so tenderly he thinks there must be a sentiment attached to each of them, and he finds that he wants to know what it is. He wants to know everything about this girl.

But he leans against the headboard of his bed instead, ignores the metal springs digging into his back. “So what's in California for you?” he asks.

“A girl named Raven,” she says as she crawls into the bed next to his, lying on her side to face him. Her jacket hangs on the back of a desk chair and, like this, her face free of make up, barefoot in a white dress, she looks so much younger than she is. Like she's never experienced all of what makes her Clarke – all that life and death and love and war. Like she's never swallowed the taste of peaches on her tongue or washed the gun powder from her hair.

“Girlfriend?” he asks.

Clarke shrugs. “Something like that. My dad’s back there too, waiting for me.”

Bellamy hums. “You run away?”

A smile stretches across her face. “I look like the type of girl to do that?”

“I could see it happening, yeah.”

She laughs then. “Well, you're right. Kinda. But it's a long story.”

“I like long stories.”

Clarke looks at him skeptically for a few moments before she relents and tells him how she ended up on the road because she'd been looking for her dad. She’s from New York originally, and she and her mother hadn't had the best relationship, only worsening with the passage of time. Clarke had blamed her for never raising her like she should've, for making her grow up too fast, for driving her father away. She tells him about the nights she'd tear her hair out from all the anxiety and pressure to be perfect, that she was always so tired of not being able to live up to her mother’s ridiculously impossible expectations. So she'd left without so much as a note, spent days hitch hiking and taking naps on buses and trains to get to the next city, the next state, with only old letters and post cards as a guide.

He thinks she might have a little bit of a flare for the dramatics, which he can, unfortunately, relate to.

“So what are you going to tell him when you get there?” he asks.

“I don't know,” she answers in a sigh. “I’ll figure it out when the time comes. But if – if it doesn't turn out the way I want it to, Raven’s got a couch set up for me at her place. Whatever happens, I'll be fine.”

When he looks at her, he can see it now, he can see past the innocence of her porcelain skin and white dress. The thousand wars she's fought through, the blood on her hands, the abandonment. The constant feeling of never being good enough.

But she smiles through it all, because he knows that, in every life, she's still the strongest person he'll ever meet. That's something that never changes.

“Sorry your mom’s an asshole,” he says.

Her laugh sounds like angels singing to him. “It happens. But enough about me. I wanna hear about you, Bellamy Blake.”

It's only because she asked that he tells her about himself. Not the gory details about his mother’s past, or about him raising Octavia since she was born, or about the constant fear he had of losing everything, including his house and his sister, if he didn't work his ass off to support them. His fifteenth birthday gift to himself was getting a second job to pay the electric bills because he woke up to a note from his mother one morning saying she'd be away for a few months without any indication of where she'd gone.

But he does tell her about the good parts. About finding Monty, Lincoln and Miller, his best friends. About seeing his sister graduate high school. He doesn't have much, never has, but he's good with what he's got, especially since he worked for it all himself. It's enough for him.

In the morning, she's leaning against the hood of his car, waiting for him, with a cigarette hanging from between red lips. He hands her a cup of lukewarm motel coffee and they get back on the road.

She gets through about half the pack before she tells him she doesn't even like smoking, doesn't like the taste or the way it makes her grit her teeth.

He doesn't think he'll ever completely understand her, but he'd spend lifetimes trying to.

x.

She’s standing out on a balcony, somewhere in Paris, her back leaning against the railing. It's a cold and gray morning after it’s rained the night before, but there's a beautiful boy sleeping in the bed behind her who makes her insides feel all warm and stupid.

The crisp, white sheets are slipping off his waist, revealing miles of tanned, defined skin, and she can see his wild curls sticking on its end, unruly, just the way she likes them.

There's a wedding dress somewhere on the floor.

Bellamy and Clarke had spent the previous night sitting on her kitchen floor, wiping cake frosting on each other’s faces, unbothered that he stained his very expensive tux with chocolate icing.

“You can hardly notice it,” he had whispered against her mouth, his hands pulling the curls loose from her bun. She could feel his smile pressing against her teeth.

They went through two bottles of champagne before he had to sit back against the kitchen counter and hold her, hardly containing his laughter as she cried into his chest because she told him she loves him so much it makes her whole body ache.

“You're an asshole,” she mumbled, lightly punching his arm.

“Yeah, but you married me anyway.”

She’d hid her smile in the crook of his neck. There's so much room in her for him, in the spaces between her spine, in the lines of her palm, in the marrow of her bones, that she struggles to remember a time in which she didn't love Bellamy.

It seems nearly impossible.

Now, Clarke moves back inside the room, sliding under the covers to lie next to him. He lifts his arm for her automatically, still half-asleep, so he can tuck her into his side and she wraps herself tightly around him, hoping their bones would melt into each other.

The light filtering through the window shines his face golden and it, like always, makes her want to kiss every single one of the freckles smattering across his cheeks and over the bridge of his nose.

“Jesus, Clarke,” he grumbles, rough like gravel scraping down his throat, his sleep-laden voice her favorite thing to wake up to, “can you not stare at me like that when I'm trying to sleep, that’d be great, thanks.”

“I'm not staring at you.”

“Clarke, I can feel you,” he huffs, and cracks one eye open. He swiftly reaches under him to take a pillow and smack her face with it. “You're about the least subtle person I've ever met in my life, did you know that.”

Clarke rolls her eyes but grins at him anyway, which makes the corners of his mouth lift into a tired smile. She snuggles in closer, because she can, and runs her fingers across his face slowly, cataloguing every inch of his skin so every time she blinks the memory of him is tucked underneath her eyelids. When her thumb swipes across his bottom lip, he playfully catches it between his teeth, biting down gently.

“I love you so much, did you know that?” She's pretty sure he gets the point by now, but she doesn't think she'll ever get tired of telling him.

He casts his eyes down, briefly, because he's still not used to being loved so openly before, so fully, doesn't think he'll ever really get used to it. Doesn't think he deserves that much love from someone like Clarke, or from anyone really. But she's just going to remind him of it until there isn't a doubt in his mind, until he can look her in the eye without faltering every time she says it.

“You're everything I could ever want in my life,” she continues, lifting his head up to look at her with a finger under his chin. “You're the best thing that keeps happening to me.”

She sees him swallow thickly and she runs her hand down his throat, her thumb pressing into the dip of his collarbone.

Clarke smiles then, all teeth, and she's not sure if she'll ever be as happy as she is in this moment. She whispers, almost reverently, like she can't actually believe it: “You're my husband. You're my _husband_ , Bellamy.”

She loves the way those words feel in her mouth, how it rolls off her tongue, how easy it is. How right.

“Yeah. And you're my wife. That's kind of how a marriage works, Clarke.” But the smile on his face, the light in his eyes, drowns out any of the sarcasm he intended.

“How many kids do you want? I'll give you two, I'll give you fifty, if that's what makes you happy. I wanna make you so happy, Bellamy.”

When he laughs and tells he he loves her, that he's already happy, she feels it all over. His love makes her spine bend backwards, makes the world spin on its axis, makes the planets align for them, just them.

It's almost like she's cracked open, her insides raw and bleeding out in front of them, whenever Bellamy looks at her like that. With his eyes always so soft and so warm it's a miracle the whole world hasn't burned down because of it. _Look how far_ , she thinks, _Look how far we've come._

It took them a while to get here, but in this life, they made it.

xi.

Sometimes, he takes just a bit too long to show up, and she starts to wonder if the last life was it for them. If she should've kissed him goodbye a little bit longer that time.

Sometimes, he’ll brush right by her in the market or on the opposite side of the street, or she'll being getting onto a train that he's just gotten off of, and she won't know. She won't know if he has brown hair or blonde hair, or if he’ll be a boy or a girl this time. She hates these, the lives in which they just barely miss each other.

It's okay, though. She knows she'll see him soon enough because even after all this, time still, always, favors them.

_  
_

_Second, whatever I was looking for_  
_was always you._  



End file.
